This blog has really just become a back-up for my main blog. Not much happens here - all the action is at http://angryaussie.wordpress.com - - Mr Angry:
Finding something to be angry about every day of the year.

Monday, June 12, 2006

A 100% Guaranteed Solution to Spam

I was wondering what I was going to post about today as I wasn't feeling particularly angry. Like that was gonna last. I checked the stats for my Wordpress site and I'd gotten near enough to 100 comment spam in 24 hours. Fucking spammers! And Akismet anti-spam got nearly every one of them. Ha! Fuck you in the neck with a search engine ranking you scum-sucking spam bastards. This is another nail in Blogger's coffin because they have no damn spam protection that I know of.

The rare occasions that I get comment spam on Blogger I delete it manually (here's a tip kids: make sure you set the blog to email you every time you get a comment, because the scamming bastards will drop spam comments in old posts hoping you won't notice.) It would be a little hard to delete 100 spam manually every day so I'm fucking glad I chose to promote the Wordpress blog over Blogger. There's no way the spamming bastards are getting me to make it harder for people to post comments unless things get really out of control.

Now I think of it, why hasn't somebody killed these fuckers. I don't mean shut them down, I mean literally kill them. They are coming damn close to breaking the internet, they are stealing millions with their scams and costing billions with the bandwidth they consume and quite simply making nearly everyone's online experience miserable. People are killed for way less than this every day. Sergey, Larry, if you're listening; killing these fuckers would NOT be evil.

And the first time someone gets serious about taking these pricks on, the arms race escalates quickly to the point of doing some real damage. If you've never heard of Blue Security or their program Blue Frog, here's a summary: Blue Frog worked by sending automated "opt-out" messages to spammers as spam victims have the right to do. Essentially if thousands of users get spammed, the spammers in return get bombarded with automated responses saying "don't spam me any more." Not quite a denial of service attack but it can certainly make life tough for spammers. Tough enough that some spammer waged all-out war in response.

Massive distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks credited to a loser spammer known as "Pharma Master" took down Blue Security 's server along with Tucows, TypePad blogs and a hell of a lot of other sites. Blue Security shut up shop after this (although there's some grey area surrounding what really went on and the motivations behind everything) saying they didn't want to be responsible for such massive disruption to the internet at large. Some weenies didn't like Blue's approach because they saw it as too aggressive or even claimed it was illegal. Every rational analysis of it I've seen said it was completely legal and quite effective.

So here we have a legal (if aggressive) service providing much needed relief to users. In response we get a destructive and completely illegal attack that damages the internet as a whole. Obviously, half-measures aren't going to work with these fuckers. If the boys at the big end of town (I'm thinking Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Amazon) aren't meeting in a smoky back room somewhere working on a plan to take these piece of shit spammer down, they're (a) wussies and (b) stupid.

Because this shit is going to start to really hurt them soon, as in destroy their whole business model when nobody trusts the internet for anything any more. So by all means, use those big brains to come up with some technological solutions. But give some thought to just having the fuckers whacked. In the end, it would be way easier and much more satisfying.

2 comments:

Mr. Angry,Blogger does have comment spam protection, although I can't verify if it works or not (because I haven't needed to use it). Just go to settings>comments and check "show word verification for comments." I notice that you don't have this option enabled...